The MapAbility project: taking the initiative on mobility

Students across Europe have started compiling information on how accessible their universities are for people with disabilities. The aim of this grassroots mapping project, examining each campus, building by building, is to encourage more disabled students to take advantage of opportunities to study abroad.

Most students travelling to study are stepping into the unknown, but those with disabilities find the process particularly intimidating. A reluctance to leave behind familiar systems of practical and social support discourages many disabled students from becoming internationally mobile. Others simply think mobility is not an option. As a result, disabled students are under-represented in mobility schemes such as the EU’s Erasmus programme. The most recent figures, from 2011-12, indicate that only 0.14% of Erasmus students had disabilities. This is significantly below their presence in the student population, which varies between 2% and 10% depending on the country.

Universities rarely provide detailed information about how easy it will be for disabled students to use their facilities, so students have set out to fill the gap with the MapAbility project. This provides a framework for local branches of the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) to log information about individual universities.

“MapAbility is supposed to help figure out where accessible universities are and where we can encourage students to go,” said ESN president Stefan Jahnke at the project launch conference in June. “We don’t want to encourage them to go to a university where they are constantly facing problems.”

The first stage is to collect information about a university’s support services, from basics such as whether websites are user-friendly to the presence of a disability office and at least one suitable hall of residence. The second stage is to look at the physical accessibility of each building on campus.

For instance, are there ramps and elevators for wheelchair-users, or orientation support such as braille and audio guides? Are there facilities for assistance animals such as guide dogs, and technical support in classrooms?

The information collected will be made available through an online map. This will show the location of each institution along with an overall accessibility score. Clicking on the location leads to the full results of the survey. Alternatively, students will be able to search by country, institution or faculty.

The project, which is funded by the Council of Europe’s European Youth Foundation, is ambitious. There are around 5,000 higher education institutions in Europe, each with dozens of buildings. Yet for ESN it was logical to work at this level.

“It seems clear to us that it is impossible to say if a university is accessible or not as a whole. Maybe one building is and ten are not, or the opposite, ten are and one is not,” said Dominique Montagnese, the member of the ESN board responsible for the project.

In its first two months, the project covered services in 172 institutions and accessibility to 556 buildings. Even from this limited sample, it is striking to find that 33% of institutions had no disability unit and 30% no hall of residence suitable for disabled students. As for the buildings, measures to address physical accessibility, such as ramps, outnumber those for sensory or cognitive disability.

Montagnese concedes that the project will involve a lot of work. “We have high expectations, and it is logical that this will be an ongoing process for the years to come.” ESN and its partners have agreed to continue the project for the next three years. These partners include other organisations harnessing social media to map accessibility, such as the city guides Jaccede and Wheelmap. These are complementary, since participating in the social side of mobility is also important for disabled students. “Erasmus is about people meeting people, and people meet in public places,” said Svenja Heinecke of Wheelmap.